‘You are failing us.’ Idaho’s handling of unemployment claims has been a disgrace
Idaho’s inability to provide unemployment benefits for thousands of Idahoans has become a disgrace.
Nearly three months after unemployment claims started rolling in because of the economic shutdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, an untold number of Idahoans are still without benefits.
Not only have some people not seen a check, some Idahoans haven’t even received contact about their status.
A semi-retired 77-year-old North Idaho man who was in the gig economy delivering auto parts told the Statesman he filed for unemployment on April 2. To this day, he still hasn’t even received an answer on whether he would qualify for benefits.
After waiting two months to get an answer about whether he’d get any payment at all, he filed for bankruptcy last week.
Lisa Theobald, a freelance book editor, filed for unemployment April 6.
She’s called the Department of Labor office more than 648 times. She’s been connected and put on hold five times. Each time, she was on hold for about an hour, and each time, she was disconnected after a recording said that nobody could help her.
Sam Merkling, who’s 65, on Social Security and worked part time before the coronavirus shutdown, has sometimes dialed the Department of Labor phone number 100 times in one morning, getting through once, staying on hold for an hour or more, then getting a recording saying no one can help and getting hung up on.
“It’s just so maddening,” Merkling said in a phone interview. “You call the governor’s office and you get happy talk. ‘Oh, we’re working on the problem, we’ve got this committee, we’re doing this.’ Well, the time is up to say you’re working on it. The time is over for happy talk.”
Merkling is just barely scraping by. Her son paid her phone bill for her, her mortgage company said she didn’t have to pay the mortgage for now, and her Social Security is enough to keep food in the house.
Theobald is going through money she was saving for retirement just to pay the bills right now.
These are just a couple of the stories repeated hundreds if not thousands of times across Idaho, as the state’s Department of Labor has failed Idahoans who are in desperate need of assistance.
When Idaho Gov. Brad Little announced that he was holding a press conference Friday, we expected that he and Department of Labor director Jani Revier would say that they had made significant steps to rectify the situation and would make sure that out-of-work Idahoans would get their money.
Instead, Little began his press conference by expressing his concern that people who make more money on enhanced unemployment would have no incentive to go back to work.
So he announced that the state will offer $1,500 bonuses to unemployed Idahoans who return to work rather than stay on unemployment.
Gov. Little, this is the least of your problems. You’ve got a bigger one that’s more immediate — that you need to take care of right now.
A go-back-to-work bonus payment will only add yet another layer of bureaucracy on top of a bureaucracy that’s not working.
If the state can’t efficiently get unemployment payments to all of its legitimate recipients, how does it plan to get $1,500 checks to full-time workers and $750 checks to part-time workers who return to jobs? And if Little and state officials think there won’t be hangups in distributing that money to workers, then why are there still so many problems with distributing the unemployment money?
Further, Gov. Little’s office followed up after Friday’s press conference with a statement that the cash bonuses are available to anyone who filed an unemployment insurance claim since March 1 – even those who have already returned to a job since then. How in the world does the state figure they’ll be able to give these bonuses to people who have filed unemployment claims when some of those original claims haven’t even been processed yet?
And frankly, it’s insulting to suggest that Idahoans are just a bunch of lazy layabouts who won’t go back to work unless given a $1,500 bonus check to get off their couch and go back to work.
Before we start throwing around $100 million as “bait” to get people to go back to work, we should solve the problem of getting unemployment checks into the hands of Idahoans who desperately need them now.
We’d rather see the governor use that $100 million to staff up a call center to handle the phone calls the state is receiving from desperate Idahoans without a paycheck right now just trying to put food on the table. Better yet, how about temporarily hiring some of these people who are unemployed to process unemployment claims?
Merkling, who previously was a mortgage officer, said “it’s clear the system is clogged. They need to unclog the system, and you do that by working the files. I could help figure out how to unclog that pipeline.”
A Facebook group called Idaho unemployment has 1,500 members. And, governor, they’re not happy.
“Going on 11 weeks self employed still no call and I called they couldn’t fix it,” one person posted on the group’s page.
On May 29, the Department of Labor announced that it had contracted with a call center to handle questions from claimants.
That didn’t go well.
“I can’t even get through,” one person wrote on the Idaho unemployment Facebook group page. “‘Because of the high call volume we can not take your call at this time’”!!
“They tell you that you must wait for (an) adjudicator to call you back, they are no help at all,” wrote another person. “Why wasn’t 30 new adjudicators hired instead of people who just (upset) us even more after waiting on hold for 2+hours.”
The 77-year-old auto parts delivery driver from North Idaho told the Idaho Statesman that he called the new number at 3:10 p.m. one day last week and was told to call back during business hours.
Paul Frantellizzi, founder and CEO of Agami Holdings, a functional-food and biosciences corporation in Boise, sent an email to Department of Labor director Revier on Friday.
“My wife and I have been trying to access our Unemployment Benefits for 2+ months,” Frantellizzi wrote in the email, which he also sent to the Idaho Statesman and Gov. Little’s office. “We have filed all the paperwork, made our weekly job search updates, called your office too many times to count, knocked on the main office door two times now, received erroneous emails from your department saying there are pending issues and still NOTHING has happened.”
Frantellizzi said he spent seven-plus years as a mayor and a police commissioner in Idaho, “and I can tell you that I would be working 24/7 to help my community, I would have a tent in your parking lot with information and computers to help people who are in desperate need, and I would be humble enough to note that MY paycheck as a civil servant comes from the hard earned paychecks of the 1.6 million residents in the great state of Idaho.”
“I want answers, I deserve answers. I hope you agree.”
Frantellizzi received an automated response from Revier:
“I am sorry, but I am unable to help you with your question. You will need to call our center. … As you may know, the Department of Labor is overwhelmed with calls.”
The letter then directs Frantellizzi to check the Department of Labor’s frequently asked questions page on its website.
Everything about this process has been a disaster.
After the first couple of weeks, we gave the state the benefit of the doubt. After all, this was an unprecedented event, with new unemployment claims filed in numbers never before seen. It was understandable that it would take time for the state to adjust.
The department told the Statesman in late April that nearly 28,000 people had unprocessed claims. Little soon thereafter pegged the number at more like 40,000.
Laid-off workers have filed about 145,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits since mid-March, 2.4 times the number of claims filed in all of 2019. The number of new claims is dropping, which is good news, but still every new claim just adds to the backlog in the pipeline. Keep in mind, too, that even if someone has gone back to work, they may still be owed unemployment from when they were out of work.
“I’m not making excuses for it,” Little said at a press conference May 28. “It’s unacceptable. But we are throwing a lot of resources and a lot of time at it.”
Not enough, though.
The state of Oregon is hiring 800 people to handle unemployment claims. Idaho is nowhere near that. Idaho brought on 30 new people with the Maximus call center, reassigned 55 Department of Labor employees across the state and hired about 20 new claims specialists.
Merkling told the Statesman on Monday that she finally got through to someone after waiting an hour-and-a-half, but the person who took her call was not able to help her, answer her questions or transfer her to a claims specialist. She only informed Merkling to wait for a call back. And so she waits, as she’s been doing for the past two months.
Idaho employers have faithfully paid into this system to help support and maintain the state’s workforce, whose members now may be pulling from it for the first time, only to discover the system is in complete chaos and dysfunction.
Nearly three months into this, it’s clear the state is not taking this seriously enough and is not treating the situation for what it has become: a crisis.
Idaho is not alone in the problem. Oregon also has seen similar problems with technical and logistical breakdowns at the state’s employment agency that resulted in tens of thousands of Oregonians being forced to wait weeks and months for unemployment benefits, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Last week, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown fired the head of the state’s employment department, showing that she’s taking the situation there seriously.
“(Gov. Little) said ‘we’re doing our best,’ and called the situation ‘unacceptable,’” Theobald wrote in a letter to the Statesman. “If your best is unacceptable, governor, then you need to do better. You are failing us.”